School Mode

Sustainability-the-word takes on new

weight with 70,000 and more dead in

Haiti. Will I  eat my spinach,  now—

knowing so many  are without nearby? 

Be more grateful for each day?  Less

afraid, anxious, worried, fearful as to

how do my classes go?

A game-changer?

Life-changer?

Or find myself sustaining  same old

Sam old watching disaster like big

car wrecks. Drive slowly by & gawk:

keep moving keep moving. IT

is beyond me.

Brad and Angelina stepping up

to the plate, Sandra Bullock

worth  millions. George and Bill.

Individuals who never sense the

contradictions of their cultural

 inheritance run the risk of

becoming little more than host

bodies for stale gestures, metaphors

and received ideas: all the stereo-

typical likes and  dislikes by which

cultures perpetuate themselves.

But this is a death and death situation..

Sustainability of another color.

Culture is something that is done to us.

Art is something we do to culture.

                                              (Carl Andre)

Live Life Like it was Art Live Life Like

it was Science Live Life Like a Good Citizen

“A poeticized culture…would not insist we find

the real world behind the painted ones, the real

touchstones of truth as opposed to touchstones

which are merely cultural artifacts. It would be

a culture which, precisely by appreciating that

all touchstones are such artifacts, would take as

its goal the creation of ever more various and

multicolored artifacts.”   Richard Rorty

In other words a-more-the-merrier-attitude toward

the Ways We Talk about HAP: the  disciplines and

traditions, sure, the common sense  ways, vernacular,

vulgar,  proper, agenda-specific, task-appropriate

ways of talking

Still: this is not a painted world:

a death &  death situation,

a sustainability of

another color.

“Krishna erases the mundane,  then erases himself,

 and these removals—precisely because they do not

 declare—open the field for human beings to spin out

endlessly their sense of what has happened.

An erasing angel who cancels what humans

have so carefully built, then cancels himself.

It operates not as a point of entry into

 meaning, but paradoxically as a

breeder of multiple meanings.  

(Hyde, in italics)

Sustainability of mind and matter.